Joe Greco wrote: [..]
Okay, here, let me make it reaaaaaaallllllyyyyy simple.
Yes, indeed lets make it reaaaaaaallllllyyyyy simple for you:
If your ISP has been delegated a /48 (admittedly unlikely, but possible) for $1,250/year, and they assign you a /56, their cost to provide that space is ~$5. They can have 256 such customers.
Fortunately ISP's get their space per /32 and up based on how much they can justify, which is the amount of customers they have. As such for a /32 single /48 is only (x / 65k) = like 20 cents or so? And if you are running your business properly you will have more clients and the price will only go down and down and down. Really (or should I write "reaaaaaaallllllyyyyy" to add force?) if you as an ISP are unable to pay the RIR fees for that little bit of address space, then you definitely have bigger problems as you won't be able to pay the other bills either. How high are your transit&equipment bills again, and how are you exactly charging your customers? ah, not by bandwidth usage, very logical! As an enduser I would love to pay the little fee for IP space that the LIR (ISP in ARIN land) pays to the RIR and then simply pay for the bandwidth that I am using + a little margin so that they ISP also earns some bucks and can do writeoffs on equipment and personnel. For some magic reasons though(*), it seems to be completely ludacrist to do it this way, even though it would make the bill very clear and it would charge the right amount for the right things and not some arbitrary number for some other arbitrary things and then later complaining that people use too much bandwidth because they use bittorrent and other such things. For the cable folks: make upstream bandwidth more pricey per class than downstream, problem of heavy-uploaders solved as they get charged. Greets, Jeroen (* = then again I don't have an mba or something like that so I prolly miss out an all kinds of important factors why people have to make it so complex)